To date, many media editing applications exist for creating a composite media presentation by compositing several pieces of media content such as video, audio, animation, still image, etc. In some cases, a media editing application combines a composite of two or more clips with one or more other clips to output (e.g., play, export) the composite presentation.
There are a number of different problems that can occur when outputting such a composite presentation. For example, some movie studios require a particular content (e.g., dialog content, music content) of a composite presentation to be separate from other content. The content separation allows the movie studios to easily replace the composite presentation's dialog in one language with a dialog in another language. The problem with providing separate content is that, once several pieces of media content are mixed as one mixed content, the mixed content cannot be un-mixed to provide the separate content.
As another example, displaying the audio levels of different media clips during playback of a composite presentation is useful as the audio levels indicate how much audio one or more of the different media clips are contributing to the overall mix. The problem with this is similar to the example described above. That is, a mix of the different media clips cannot be un-mixed during playback to provide metering information for the different media clips.
In addition, some media editing applications apply one or more different effects (e.g., reverb effect, echo effect, blur effect, distort effect, etc.) to a set of clips when outputting a composite presentation. Several of these effects are applied using a “send” (i.e., “send and return”) that entails routing audio signals of different clips over an auxiliary (“aux”) bus to an effects unit. For a typical media editing application, a “send” effect is applied with the user manually adding an input aux track, specifying an effect for the aux track, specifying an input bus for the aux track, creating the “send”, and identifying the specified bus to route the audio signals of different clips. In this manner, several audio signals of different clips can be routed over one aux bus in order to apply a same effect (e.g., an echo effect) to a combined audio signal of the different clips. However, the “send” technique becomes increasingly complicated as additional aux buses are added to route audio signals of multiple different clips.
Furthermore, several of the media editing applications described above allow users to view metadata associated with media content and/or perform organizing operations using the metadata. However, these media editing applications lack the tools or the functionality to perform different editing operations by using one or more pieces of metadata that is associated with the media content.
The concepts described in this section have not necessarily been previously conceived, or implemented in any prior approach. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any concepts described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.